Here is a list: Danny Williams Frankie Vaughan Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen Sandy Nelson Pat Boone Acker Bilk Russ Conway Bobby Vee Petula Clark Neil Sedaka. But ask yourself: what guitar groups? There were the Shadows, and, um? Look at the pop chart for the end of December 1961, the week before the Beatles’ recording test at Decca. I mean, the old line that gets trotted out, that record companies turned them down, saying, “Guitar groups are over”: that’s just something we’ve accepted all these years. And when you read this book, you understand just how profoundly true that is. As David Hepworth is fond of saying, The Beatles are underrated. When you read, in other biographies, They grew up in Liverpool or, Ringo came from one of the rougher parts of town or, Paul and John met at a church fete, John was impressed that Paul could play “Twenty Flight Rock” – when you read lines like that, you have no idea how much more you could know, not just in terms of trivia, but in terms of a deeper understanding and a greater appreciation of just what The Beatles achieved. It will not come as a shock to anyone who has read this that I was wrong: the world definitely needed this book about The Beatles. And now I don’t have to have yet another huge tome creaking on the already overloaded bookshelf, now I can just whack it on the Kindle, I decided to give it a read. This book only takes us to the end of 1962, and I didn’t think I’d want to know any more about this period.īut Lewisohn’s forthcoming stage show about Abbey Road prompted me to look – and think – again. Furthermore, I was convinced that of all the things about The Beatles, the stuff about them before they were famous was the least interesting. And so I noted this and ignored it, thinking both that I knew it all and that my interest in the subject had been saturated long ago. My reaction to the news of this book, back in 2013 when it was first published in hardback, was probably not uncommon: does the world really need another book about The Beatles? I had read so many, from the Hunter Davies authorised biography that was published before they even broke up to the lush hagiography of the Anthology doorstopper.

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